Steve Vinoski’s Blog

In my column entitled “Toward Integration,” published in the IEEE Internet Computing magazine, I write about various aspects of middleware, integration, distributed systems, and programming languages and techniques for developing such systems. You can access the original columns on-line at the Internet Computing website, or access PDFs of the same using the links below.

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  In the May/June 2008 column, Multilingual Programming, explores reasons why being adept at using multiple programming languages can be helpful for integration projects (and actually, useful for programming projects in general). Integration projects inherently involve diverse technologies. Even so, many integration developers try to force problems to fit their favorite programming language, regardless of how well that language helps solve the problem, and regardless of whether other languages offer a better fit. Multilingual programmers embrace the diversity of programming languages, enabling them to apply different languages to different integration problems to produce higher-quality solutions that are faster, easier, and less expensive to develop, maintain, and enhance. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the March/April 2008 column, Demystifying RESTful Data Coupling, I discuss issues surrounding data coupling in RESTful systems. REST detractors often claim that the uniform interface constraint simply moves all the coupling issues from the interface to the data, but as this column explains, that simply isn’t the case. RESTful data allows for looser coupling than data exchanged in RPC-based systems. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the January/February 2008 column, Serendipitous Reuse, I explore some issues that arise in distributed services systems that either inhibit or enhance reuse. By definition, we can’t plan for serendipity, but it might be possible to make a given situation more amenable to it. The question becomes: Is it feasible to arrange the primary elements of an area such as enterprise integration in a way that encourages the development of beneficial applications that the enterprise architects never dreamed of? This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the November/December 2007 column, Reliability with Erlang, I explore Erlang’s outstanding support for building highly-reliable systems. I first discuss some of the problems that such systems face, and then explain the core primitives that Erlang provides for dealing with them. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the September/October 2007 column, Concurrency with Erlang, I follow up Rachid Guerraoui’s column from the previous issue (see below) and suggest that another answer to enabling developers to write highly-concurrent systems is to give them a language specifically designed for just that. Erlang is getting a lot of attention these days, not only because of its concurrency capabilities, but also because the robustness and reliability of the systems it can help produce. Joe Armstrong’s excellent book Programming Erlang is also helping fuel the current interest in Erlang. In this column, I show some example programs in Erlang and compare them against similar multithreaded code in Java and C++. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the July/August 2007 column, A Smooth Concurrency Revolution with Free Objects, my guest columnist Rachid Guerraoui discussed the fact that popular programming languages and approaches are ill-equipped to deal with the fact that our processors are rapidly gaining multiple cores and are thus far more capable than ever of executing software concurrently at virtually all times. He explains the notion of “free objects” as a way of introducing concurrency into OO systems without forcing programmers to give up the OO development approaches they’re comfortable with.

• In the May/June 2007 column, Let’s Have a Conversation, my guest columnist Gregor Hohpe discusses conversational patterns. He provides an overview of what such patterns are, explains choreography and orchestration, and explains that conversations are a critical but often overlooked aspect of a service’s interface.

• There was no March/April 2007 column. I was too busy with a job change to write for that issue — sorry about that!

• In the January/February 2007 column, REST Eye for the SOA Guy, I try to take a middle ground with respect to the REST vs. SOA debate by trying to explain to SOA proponents like myself the benefits that REST brings to distributed systems. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the November/December 2006 column, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), I provide an overview of AMQP, which is targeted to become the first standardized enterprise messaging protocol. This column explains the basics of AMQP and describes what’s currently happening in the AMQP community. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the September/October 2006 column, Ruby Extensions, I explore how you can integrate Ruby with your existing C or C++ middleware. Writing Ruby extensions is relatively easy, but still requires good design and proper layering to get it right. The productivity gains you can get from being able to write Ruby instead of C or C++ can be quite significant. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the July/August 2006 column, Enterprise Integration with Ruby, I review Maik Schmidt’s new book of the same name. If your background is like mine — building middleware with traditional languages like C++ and Java — you’ll want to read this book. Ruby is a great language, and Schmidt provides a broad, balanced, and compelling picture of how it can be successfully applied to enterprise integration projects. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the May/June 2006 column, Scripting JAX-WS, I continue my exploration of the general lack of overlap between the middleware and dynamic scripting language communities. This time, however, I contribute an answer: how to script JAX-WS 2.0 using the JavaScript or E4X languages, based on the Celtix open source ESB. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the March/April 2006 column, The Language Divide, I explore why it seems there’s so little overlap between the middleware and dynamic scripting language communities. I also explain why I believe this is changing. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the January/February 2006 column, The Social Side of Services, I talk about some of the hardest barriers to successful SOA development and deployment. Here’s a hint: they’re not technical. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the November/December 2005 column, Old Measures for New Services, I go back to structured programming to see how its measures of system quality can still be applied to today’s service-oriented applications.

• In the September/October 2005 column, RPC Under Fire, I review Steve Loughran’s and Edmund Smith’s excellent paper entitled Rethinking the Java SOAP Stack, which provides a detailed and accurate critique of JAX-RPC, and I also talk about problems with RPC in general. I conclude the column with a look at alternatives to RPC-style programming.

• In the July/August 2005 column, Java Business Integration, I take a look at the JSR 208 specification and why it, unlike most Java specifications, uses something other than Java for service interface definitions. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the May/June 2005 column, WS-Addressing Metadata, I discuss the ability to include metadata within WS-Addressing endpoint references (EPRs), and how it resolves my concerns regarding the use of EPRs as web service references. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the March/April 2005 column, Web Service References, I discuss issues with and progress toward the provision of a standard web services reference, used for addressing web service instances. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the January/February 2005 column, A Time for Reflection, I discuss the growing utility and importance of reflective approaches for modern applications. Reflective techniques offer significant flexibility advantages for today’s systems.

• In the November/December 2004 column, WS-NonexistentStandards, I take a look at the “WS-*” collection of specifications and wonder why we have so many web services (WS) specifications, but so few actual standards. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the September/October 2004 column, Is Your Middleware Dead?, I step outside the realm of pure technology and discuss our industry’s tendency to declare anything but the latest technologies or approaches as "dead" without any consideration for how technology markets actually work. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the July/August 2004 column, Dark Matter Revisited, I touch again on the subject of "middleware dark matter," discussing three different distributed computing frameworks written in dynamic programming languages such as Python and Perl. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the May/June 2004 column, More Web Services Notifications, I continue my investigation of Web Services events and notification systems from the previous column with a brief overview of the WS-Notification specification. In addition, I conclude this column with a quick look into some middleware-related weblogs. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the March/April 2004 column, Web Services Notifications, I discuss several specifications that companies such as BEA, Microsoft, and HP have written for Web Services events and notification systems, and the various issues surrounding them, especially the need for Web Service references in such systems.

• In the January/February2004 column, The More Things Change…, I discuss middleware versioning issues, covering the fundamentals of versioning problems in distributed object systems and messaging systems. You probably won’t like my conclusion! This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the November/December 2003 column, Integration With Web Services, I talk about the promise of handling enterprise integration problems using Web Services abstractions. SOAP is not the real strength of Web Services — WSDL is. Specifically, WSDL can be used as a multi-middleware abstraction language, providing an unprecedented level of abstraction across middleware systems that’s concrete enough to allow for seamless binding and messaging to different middleware systems using their native formats and protocols.

• In the September/October 2003 column, Do You Know Where Your Architecture Is?, I talk about various issues related to middleware architectures, or the lack thereof, including the difference between technology and architecture. I also compare Extreme Programming (XP) and Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) as different ways of developing architectures.

• In the July/August 2003 column, Invocation Styles, I present the basics of different kinds of ways distributed applications call services, and discuss the various trade-offs one makes when adopting a particular calling style.

• In the May/June 2003 column, It’s Just a Mapping Problem, I talk about issues related to mapping the artifacts from one middleware system into another. This topic gets a lot of attention today because those working with Web Services are just now discovering how thorny some middleware mapping problems can get. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the March/April 2003 column, The Performance Presumption, I discuss what I see as an unbalanced pursuit of middleware performance. I explain why I think performance receives more focus than it often deserves, and discuss other middleware characteristics that often deserve as much or more attention and focus. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the January/February 2003 column, Service Discovery 101, I present the basics of service discovery. As more and more people move toward service-oriented architectures, they find out just how important — in fact, critical — discovery is for any flexible middleware deployment, where avoiding hard-wired point-to-point connections is key.

• In the November/December 2002 column, Chain of Responsibility, I talk about one of my favorite and most frequently used patterns in middleware development: the Chain of Responsibility pattern. It’s amazing how many times this pattern appears in modern middleware.

• In the September/October 2002 column, Middleware Dark Matter, I present a case for the existence of middleware “dark matter.” This dark matter represents non-traditional middleware that’s used extensively for simple integration projects, but nobody ever really talks about it — things like Perl, Python, Tcl, and Visual Basic. However, this dark matter heavily influences all of middleware, and is a large part of the drive behind Web Services. This column is also available in the IEEE Distributed Systems Online journal.

• In the July/August 2002 column, Web Service Interaction Models, Part 2: Putting the “Web” in Web Services, I conclude my coverage of Web Services interaction models by discussing RPC, messaging, orchestration, and the application of the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style to Web Services. REST is what has allowed the Web itself to proliferate, so standardizing Web Services interaction models that ignore REST would be very Web-unfriendly.

• In the May/June 2002 column, Web Services Interaction Models, Part 1: Current Practice I write about Web Services interaction models and why some popular approaches to web services are not as simple as they’re made out to be. Some like to promote the direct exposure of low-level software assets directly as web services, but I explain why that approach, while sometimes useful, generally causes problems because of inappropriate levels of abstraction.

• In the March/April 2002 column, Where Is Middleware?, I provide a general overview of the state of middleware in our industry today. Middleware is basically everywhere, and I discuss the various forces that have shaped it, along with where it seems to be going.